Nikon’s Universcale puts the universe in perspective, showing us all kinds of objects in relation to each other. Explore objects from the smallest of sizes to the largest known to man, from tiny protons all the way up to the outer limits of the universe. Universcale is an eye-opening Flash visualization and I actually wish school had been more like this. Try it out if you want to feel like a giant and a microbe all at the same time.

Poly9 FreeEarth is a free Flash application that offers you a 3-dimensional globe to include on your website. FreeEarth supports superimposing of metadata (such as weather data or Flickr geodata), animation (such as flight routes), combination with 2D mapping tools, satellite image tiling, numerous celestial bodies (the solar system planets, moons and the sun), and some more Web2.0 gimmickry. Check out the FreeEarth website to see some of the neat applications it can be used for.

SWFUpload is a flash-powered file-upload widget intended to replace the regular HTML file-upload form element. In their own words, SWFUpload is “a small javascript/flash library to get the best of both worlds – The great upload capabilities of flash and the accessibility and ease of html/css”. SWFUpload offers a number of usability and styling features the standard html version can’t offer, and for those who don’t have Flash/Javascript, SWFUpload degrades gracefully.

Update 2008-11-22: It appears SWFUpload has moved to a new domain in the meantime: www.swfupload.org. Thanks to readers Kooshal and Jigna for letting us know.

First off, sorry to my English speaking readers, as the following recommendation is a German site, but I had to give it a mention.

Spoonfork, a project by my ex-classmate Bashar Farhat and editor Katja Neumann, is a highly creative flash magazine. Spoonfork is all about lifestyle: music, fashion, designers, modern furniture and more. What sets it apart from other lifestyle sites is that it’s built up like a real magazine and every page is put together with a lot of care for details, offering various methods of interaction, minigames, audio, downloads, prizes, and things you wouldn’t normally expect from an online mag. With their bimonthly schedule, I know Bashar and Katja spend many long nights creating refreshingly new concepts for Spoonfork’s pages. And the hard work is worth it: it’s just so much fun flipping through the pages, discovering all the little gimmicks they’ve hidden.
A little tip: flip through to the back cover, they’ve added a little surprise this issue.

Spoonfork has recently won a bronze “Lead Award 2007” and they’re nominated for the Grimme Online Award right now. So, if you have a little time, go check out Spoonfork, it’s worth it! Also, if you have a little more time perhaps you could help them out by voting for them. Gook luck to Spoonfork from position: absolute.

Looking for some Flash inspiration? Mathieu Badimon has a 3-dimensional experimental Flash showcase that’s not only got some highly advanced ActionScript but is beautiful to look at. You can change the view angle of each experiment as well. Very high on the coolness-factor. (Thanks, draft.media)

About time someone came up with this. If you are working with Flash and need to test your products in various Flash versions, the new Flash Switcher extension offers a very easy way to do that. Just select the version you need from the icon in the status bar, and the extension will quickly auto-install the appropriate Flash version and reload the page. Tried it out, works like a charm for me. (mac version here.)

Welie.com has a comprehensive resource of patterns in interaction design. Interface designer Martijn van Welie is rounding up all of the common pratices in UI design, be that in web design, applications or mobile interfaces. Not a joy to the eye but full of valuable information, giving you insight into what can all be done and points of argument that can help in explaining to a client why you chose a certain interface. DesignInterfaces.com offers a similar archive.

In a recent post titled The New Face of Flash, Andy Budd provides some insight into how Flash has been developing in a positive manner over the past years, away from the scenario in Jakob Nielsen‘s famous article “Flash 99% Bad“. Especially noteworthy is the approach of separating content from presentation, a practice most of us have been preaching with modern XHTML+CSS design.

“Flash still seemed like a very clunky way to build applications. This is when Aral introduced me to MXML, an XML user interface language much like XUL. Rather than building his interface in Flash, Aral was editing XML files. Adding a <mx :TextInput /> tag would create an input box, adding a <mx :Button /> would create a button element. Aral explained that the MXML file was really intended for presentation only, and all the data and logic were dealt with elsewhere. Hmm I thought, separating presentation from data sounds familiar, I wonder where I’ve heard that before?”

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